Paul "The Punisher" Williams retrospective, a decade after career-ending accident

"Floyd sucked Paul" remains far more credible to me than "Floyd sucked Tony".

 

DUCKED, goddamn autocorrect, duck's sake.

Hate posting on my phone. These minuscule touchscreen keyboards are made for the delicate fingers of an 11 year old Japanese girl, not my huge gaijin kielbasa digits.

 

I agree with almost everything here, save that I don't think he was a sure bet over Floyd, just a VERY difficult puzzle (which Floyd and his camp wisely recognized and thus rarely spoke about the match-up, discretion being the better part of valor) ...and I do still consider the Grandmaster a larger what-if, only because he only had a few matches at the world class elite tier, whereas PTP did have several chances. Pirog was actually older than Williams, funnily enough, but he was "fresher" and only had two minor steps up professionally after coming from obscurity to score the Jacobs upset - Maciel and Ishida. Williams had a far more extensive slate of "big" fights, and probably less in his tank with so many hard rounds on the odometer for that matter. Williams being 50-50 with a green Canelo is well and good, but most people who remember him make Pirog even money or a slight fave over a freaking prime Golovkin, which is a little bit different. . Pirog's own back injury (ruptured disc) deprived him of greater glory, although outside the ring obviously nowhere near as bad, as he can still walk unassisted.

I actually did a thread on the pair of them in 2018, and people overwhelmingly sided with Pirog h2h:
https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/paul-williams-vs-dmitry-yurievich-pirog.620254/

I'd probably slightly favor him myself, but made this observation speaking to my earlier points about the decline in perception, and how bookies didn't see him as hopeless versus Canelo:

 

That was such an exciting time, when you had three powerful and skillful unbeaten Eastern-European middleweight prospects in the pipeline. It really seemed a crap shoot then as to which of them would be the most successful. Crazy as it may be to reflect on it now, for a hot minute HBO was super into "Super G", and seemed primed and ready to give the Pole, and not Triple G, the big import push to regular main event status that was eventually bestowed on the Kazakh. Then a random pillow-fisted Aussie named Kerry Hope dealt out maybe the most goggling derailment of a hype train in recent memory.

I always liked the juxtaposition of their boxing educations, too. Not sure if you or anybody else knew or remembered this, but:

• Grzegorz Proksa taught himself. Period. He turned pro under László Veres of Hungary - and respectfully, that guy's pretty damn useless. Just a glorified pad-holder. Proksa had grown up a rabid consumer of whatever American boxing telecasts he could get and copied those styles into a syncretic one all his own (with his own peculiar habits sprinkled in, like the overhand left thrown in "triangular arm" fashion with his elbow pointed at the sky). He did okay with that weird DIY hodgepodge style in the amateurs on the Polish scene, racking up a 117-13 record, good for 90% but with limited domestic opposition. In the pros, he jumped between a succession of mediocre teachers starting with Veres and consequently, never climbed the mountaintop and fulfilled his natural talent's promise.
  
  
• Dmitry Pirog did something rather similar, but with some minor tweaks. An extremely intelligent child, he was far more into chess than boxing (hence the nickname). In fact, boxing remained "merely a hobby" for him, in his own words, all through his amateur campaign which ran twice as long as Proksa's! He went 200-30 (86%) but at higher levels, cutting his teeth on the more challenging Russian scene and dipping his toes in the broader Slavic and European waters. All throughout, he basically was auto-didactic (self-taught) in the sport, and would religiously watch the same handful of VHS tapes of, not just American boxing in general like Proksa, but specifically Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Sugar Ray Leonard, whose imprints and influence on his style are very obvious when you watch him. It wasn't until 9 fights deep into his pro career that he decided "okay, guess I'm a boxer, and will take it seriously" and hired a trainer.
  
  
• Gennady Golovkin was groomed to be a star amateur, in the notoriously strong Kazakh program, and went a legendary 345-8 (97%...used to be widely misreported as 345-5, but still damn impressive with the additional three defeats tacked on). He was routinely getting in fistfights starting in kindergarten (!!) and took up boxing at the age of eight. GGG learned the ropes under savvy Karaganda native Victor Dmitriev and was soon thrust into regional tourneys before having even hit puberty. Needless to say, the guy on this list with the most knowledgeable coaching and most formally structured education in the sport, as well as the most expansive, rigorous and dominant amateur career...lo and behold, achieved the most.

 

Don't forget Sturm had long held a belt hostage, too.

 

Paul himself, unlike Antonio, never stooped to selling the "Floyd ducked me" narrative to gas himself up, despite having more claim to it, because...well, unlike Antonio, he's a class act.

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I think he's right, btw. If he did upset Álvarez, he very well may have finally gotten that even juicier payday with PBF. His name value would have been all-time high, so it would have made a lot more dollars & sense than Mayweather's actual next fight (Robert Guerrero, decent fighter but hardly ever a worldwide superstar) and simultaneously Mayweather's camp would have keenly scouted that Lara performance as their blueprint for outboxing him and concluded "now the reward factor has skyrocketed and risk factor has plummeted since his up-and-coming freakishly tall welterweight prospect days..."

 

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